Microsoft now owns Crash Bandicoot

[A Black Falcon]

ABF, it leads closer and closer to a monopoly, and in the past, that was enough.  They used to break up companies for far less.

It's not a monopoly by any possible definition of the term, though.  It is industry consolidation.  Studios are being bought left and right by larger studios, and larger studios are being bought by ones even larger than that.  After this purchase Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly on anything.  We seem to be heading towards an oligarchy or such though, as only a handful of companies will own everything...

If you don't think that what MS is doing, and in a bigger sense what Disney HAS been doing, is monopolistic, I don't know what you consider a monopoly.  Are we supposed to blithely accept every last step on the way towards a monopoly except for that very last merger at the very end of the chain, or should we, perhaps, recognize a trend and cut it off before it reaches that desperate point?  What exactly do you think anti-monopoly laws are for?

Don't you need to control an entire industry, have total control of things in a region, or such, for something to be a monopoly?  I don't understand your definition of monopoly, when after the sale there will still be other companies selling similar products in the same field.

That said, I fully support the government taking a look at the deal, it's a MASSIVE deal and any deal that huge deserves regulatory oversight.

Sony can say all they want.  You may not have read it, but MS said exactly the same things about their acquisition of both Zenimax and Activision Blizzard.  They ALSO claimed that they'd let "certain" series stay multiplatform, such as the Calls of Duties.  It might even be true for a little bit.  But that's the thing, they're lying.  Sony is ALSO lying.  It's just not immediately obvious that they did.  At best, what they've promised is that the games that these companies already released on multiple consoles will not be retroactively pulled from said consoles and their online services will remain up.  That's... not the most convincing thing.  MS and Sony "aren't running a charity here!", to quote 90's business villains.  If you don't believe they have every intention of reneging on their words in a few years, you're naïve.

While somewhat similar, the language of the two is different.  Sony's language isn't vague, like Microsoft's.  It is clear and straightforward.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2...vice-games
"Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan says that Destiny 2 and future Bungie games will continue to be published on other platforms, including rival consoles."

Microsoft never said anything like that after buying Bethesda or Activision-Blizzard.  They didn't say "all games by these studios will be Microsoft platform exclusive", but they did NOT say anything as clear as Sony's statement there.  They said that games currently planned for other platforms would continue to be on those platforms, but said nothing about future games.  After learning Starfield will be exclusive, people knew for sure what this means: with very few exceptions future games will be exclusives, only the ones already contracted to be on Sony systems will be on Playstation.

Now, Call of Duty Warzone (the live service spinoff) may continue to be made for Playstation, joining Minecraft as something Microsoft makes for everything, but in a few years we probably will see a main-line COD game not release on Playstation.

Now, does that mean that there won't be Sony-exclusive games from Bungie at some point in the future, no, of course that could happen.    But it sounds like Bungie is getting significant independence; the focus seems more on Sony getting live service game experience and revenues, and Bungie having an easier way to make more cross-media things based on their games.  Sony owns movie and TV studios and such, after all.